The Score turns to the Web for a new beginning

The view at The Score network is classic old-school broadcasting — a wall of TV monitors illuminates a crowded control room where producers hunker over tiny lights fixed to equipment that blink and flutter with purpose.

In an adjacent studio, cameras shoot JE Skeets and Tas Melas, the two co-hosts of The Basketball Jones, or TBJ, who are breaking down this spring’s NBA Finals.

The guys’ analysis fills half a dozen monitors in the next room, but a couple are showing another segment altogether, featuring long-time network personality, Cam Stewart.

“That’s the television channel,” someone informs a visitor.

We need to sort of reinvent ourselves

The moment offers the chaotic rush of live television, except it’s not. The segment is being streamed by The Score live to its growing Internet audience.

TBJ is a premier digital “vertical” for Score Media Inc., the country’s third and smallest English-language all-sports network. For more than a decade, the channel has competed and thrived against far larger competitors, TSN and Sportsnet, for viewer attention and ad dollars.

Without the backing of larger corporate parents, The Score has always lacked the resources of its competitors — by far. It has held its ground in part by leveraging a regulatory godsend.

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Starting out as a cable channel strictly streaming scores and results, the network holds a “category A” broadcast licence as an information provider.

The designation means the channel must be offered by cable distributors across the country, a condition that’s carried the network into millions of homes and, crucially, kept ad rates high. The condition has also generated a steady stream of subscription revenues.

The network too has been savvy in where it’s spent its rights budget, doing a commendable job securing U.S. college basketball, NBA and other programming skewed toward younger male audiences — a strategy that has built loyalty among fans early on. Far more costly rights to hockey and NFL football meanwhile have been eschewed.

But on April 1, 2011, the game changed overnight.

That’s when telecom giant BCE acquired TSN and its parent television network CTV Inc. for $1.3-billion. The acquisition immediately opened a new even more brutally competitive chapter between the country’s biggest sports broadcaster and No. 2 player, Sportsnet, owned by rival telecom conglomerate Rogers Communications Inc.

A programming arms races has since ensued, with The Score losing key contracts, like some NCAA basketball.

The Score — which like many has seen consolidation coming — has hedged itself by establishing early a popular and hugely promising mobile app business doing, fittingly enough, what the channel originally did: stream scores and sports headlines, now to smartphone users.

On the broadcast side, its programming future however appears to be shifting to the Web.

“We need to sort of reinvent ourselves,” Jonathan Savage, vice-president of marketing said in an interview on a muggy June morning in Toronto.

To be sure, The Score still puts live television programming at the core of what the company does. But times are changing fast. While the market for broadcast rights across any platform including online has become “extremely difficult” to play in because of the TSN acquisition and other inflationary factors, Score executives see new growth opportunities through TBJ.

“We’ll continue to invest on our television platform, but digital, this is a new kind of scaling,” says Mr. Savage, who began recruiting and developing bloggers and local personalities a couple of years ago, establishing a roster of Web-focused franchises that blend culture and commentary with sports reporting.

The goal is to amass devoted digital audiences that can presumably be monetized through advertising across The Score’s Web and mobile properties.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Savage looks to U.S. sportscasting powerhouse ESPN as a guiding light, specifically, standout executives and professionals at the Disney-owned property like Mark Shapiro and sportswriter Bill Simmons.

Glancing across his desk at a copy of the Bristol, Conn.-based network’s best-selling history from last year, Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, The Score executive points to a moment roughly a third of the way through the book when executives like Mr. Shapiro recognized that the network’s personalities have become integral in winning over audiences — perhaps as much as the games themselves.

“They set out to create cults of personality,” Mr. Savage says. “ESPN started with nothing and built up their reputation around these personalities.”

The most instructive example is that of Bill Simmons, the U.S. network’s prolific and immensely popular sportswriter who has blazed a trail in merging pop-culture with sports coverage.

“He was a digital native, writing a blog for a Boston newspaper and caught the attention of ESPN. They built a following around his personality [that] wasn’t tied to hightlight rights, league rights, he just shot off the cuff,” Mr. Savage says.

The Score hopes the guys at TBJ and its other franchises, like Backhand Shelf (hockey), Getting Blanked (baseball) and The Footy Show (soccer) can recreate a similar buzz and interest to that of Mr. Simmons, or even Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick who elevated Sportcenter to must-see-TV status in the early 1990s.

Still, cutting through the digital clutter and reaching fickle online audiences is a monumental challenge, even for the largest of media organization. ESPN had dedicated distribution across American cable networks, but online, there’s no such partners to elevate programming above the din.

But that too is changing. Mr. Savage, The Score’s first “all-digital” executive hired in 2001, has long seen Web-based programming as the next step in the evolution of TV.

So has Robert Kyncl, the vice-president of content for YouTube, the wildly popular — and wildly changing — video platform owned by search giant Google Inc.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, the executive predicted that by the end of the decade, three-quarters of all professional programming will be made and viewed over the Internet.

It’s Mr. Kyncl’s goal to make YouTube the distributor of choice for a host of online program creators now in their infancy. It has put up $100-million in seed money this year to get production off the ground for scores of YouTube channels.

While The Score hasn’t received any of the seed money — yet — it has launched its own channel and is working closely with executives for the Google platform, Mr. Savage says.

“We say around here Google is the next Comcast,” The Score executive says, referring to the largest cable company in the United States.

James McQuivey, analyst at Forrester Research, estimates that YouTube is poised to double, triple or even quintuple its seed fund next year to US$500-million in an effort to cultivate a network of channels to rival that of the existing cable universe.

“It’s not a prediction based on a crystal ball, but a realization that that’s the amount of money that Google’s revenue increases every quarter. For them to drop half a billion dollars in production on new content is nothing,” the analyst said.

“With more and more people connected, the economics are improving,” YouTube’s Mr. Kyncl told USA Today in a recent interview. “It makes sense that storytellers of all kinds would want to come to us.”

Where the relatively small piece that is The Score fits into this emerging content constellation is anything but clear, but just as the company has done with its vaunted app business, The Score is out in front early in a game that’s just getting started.

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I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.